In this article, competencies of teachers for an age of migration where students with refugee and migration background are part of many classrooms are tied to the question why a current reform in initial teacher education failed to adjust to an urgent need. The country under scrutiny for this case-study is Austria. The focus is on the curricula of secondary teacher education. It had to be developed along the new Bologna architecture—a top-down requirement—and bottom-up filled with content by the teacher educators of the institutions involved in the reform. First, I will give a short historical and present-day sketch of migration and schooling in Austria in the light of international data and the comparative context integration theory. Secondly, I will discuss relevant topics in initial teacher education and present data from the TALIS 2018 survey. Thirdly, I will describe the reform of the initial teacher education in Austria and discuss four hypotheses why it did not manage to respond to the needs of today’s socio-culturally, linguistically and religious highly diverse schools. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

DOI: 10.1080/13540602.2022.2062721
ISSN: 13540602